Barking Doggrel

Byron Vincent has been hailed as a worthy successor to chicken-town's finest, John Cooper Clarke, and this debut collection on hyper-cool boutique publisher, Nasty Little Press, does everything to encourage the comparison.

Vincent's canvas is small dead-end towns with no hopes and dreams and he uses these to construct images of morality show massacres, dipsomaniacs, drugs and the draw of the dark woods. Amongst these social satires, laced with the darkest wit and the prickliest of barbed words, are more polemical pieces like 'Hey Theism' which gives organised religions a big telling off. 'All About Charlie' tells of 'festival Chuck Norris' and its ego-inflating powers.

The poetry is rhythmical, coarse, foul-mouthed and utterly compelling, written out phonetically like you can hear the taunting slur from the back of the chip shop on a Preston high road. Essentially, even if you think you don't like poetry, you will enjoy this. If you love poetry, you should already have it.

Nasty Little Press, having tamed Luke Wright to the page and brought us John Osborne's sad heartfelt tales, now has managed to harness Byron Vincent's electric live performance into this brilliant little pamphlet.